My name is Marion Vermazen. I am a renaissance woman working full time to live, to love, to learn, to be useful, and to be interesting.

Web/Tech

October 24, 2006

Digital Rules by Rich Karlgaard is almost always thought provoking. Recently he pointed to a fascinating article by George Gilder titled The Information Factories. Gilder talks about how we are moving towards massive centralized computing and what this means in terms of power consumption and computer design. He estimates that "the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts..... Five gigawatts is almost enough to power the Las Vegas metropolitan area... on the hottest day of the year."

Gilder who is known as a futurist says that "For the moment, at least, the power of massive parallelism has far outstripped the promise of alternative computing architectures" but he anticipates that just as centralized computing gave way to the PC revolution the pendulum will swing again. New technologies and the next wave of innovation "will compress today's parallel solutions.... and transform the calculus of storage, bandwidth, and power that gives centralization its current advantage."

I think it is prescient that when he is talking about the future of computing he quotes Andy Bechtolsheim who is one of Sun's founders and is currently Sun's Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Network Systems. I predict and, in fact, hope that Sun will manage to lead the way into this new future.

October 12, 2006

Since my Compaq desktop computer died several months ago I have been using my work laptop as my home computer too. But now that I only have 6 more days of work left before I retire :-) I need to buy a new home computer. Since I am planning to do a lot of traveling and blogging as I travel I want to buy a laptop. I already have a good monitor and keyboard for home use. I am just starting the shopping/ research process. I would be very interested in any suggestions or advice that people might have about what to buy and how to buy it.

January 15, 2006

A few weeks ago I took the time management class that Intuit offers. My main reason for taking the class was to improve my effectiveness using Outlook. Before I started at Intuit I had never used Outlook. I came out of the class with a great Outlook based system. It allows me to focus on what I need to do as opposed to letting my email manage me.

Anyway the purpose of this post is not to talk about Outlook or time management. The class got me interested in using a PDA again. I had a couple of Palm Pilots a few years ago buy syncing them on a Sun system was a difficult exercise and after I lost all my data a couple of times and then had the last one stolen out of the office where I was charging it I decided to go back to a paper based system. Currently I carry an address book, a calendar and a little Moleskine notebook in my purse. I like how easy it is to access them. The class made me think I'd like to have everything synced up and current in one place, especially my to do list. So I thought I would take advantage of the fact that I am due for a new phone. I had decided to buy an integrated phone / PDA. A guy in the class said he liked his Palm PC. And I have some Christmas money to spend.

I went to the Verizon store a couple of weeks ago and found out that they won't sell you a integrated phone / PDA unless you subscribe to wireless Internet. I have a personal aversion to monthly fees. I already pay monthly fees for for cable TV, DSL, telephone, cell phone, utilities, and home owners dues. Why would I want to pay another $60 per month ($60 per month at 8% interest over 10 years comes to $10,976) for wireless Internet). I'm sure it is nice to have but I'm not convinced it is worth it.

So the question is... and I would love your input. Do I stay with the paper based system? Or do I buy a new PDA without the cell phone and wireless Internet? If I do get a PDA what kind should I get?

August 02, 2005

It is bugging me that I can't remember who first articulated the relationship between the number of participants in a community like ebay and its usefulness. The bottom line is that the bigger the community the more valuable the service. I know I have read this somewhere and it is one of the basic tenets of the Internet economics. As the number of people who use the Internet increases so does the rate of attachment because the Internet becomes more and more useful. I can't even figure out how to Google this to find what I am looking for. If someone can point me to a link I'd appreciate it.I remember that the principal was described much more clearly than I am describing it.

UPDATE: Thanks to atthecrux for answering my question. The law I am looking for is Metcalfe's Law , aka the "network effect".

But that is not exactly what I want to talk about here. The purpose of this posting is to talk about Zipingo.com. It is a new service that Intuit has launched into beta test this week. We are building a database of business ratings. The site describes itself as the "yellow pages with ratings." Obviously a site like this isn't useful unless what you are interested in has been rated. So for now we are trying to get a lot of ratings. By the way I am not working on this project at Intuit. When I say we I am saying we as in Intuit. Anyway Zipingo is only going to be really useful when it has millions of ratings so Intuit has added a link to Zipingo from Quicken 2006 and a link from Quickbooks. This should make it really easy for people to rate their transactions. It is also really easy to rate a business or your optometrist or your chiropractor from the site itself. Give it at try! I am really enjoying watching the growth of the number of rankings on the site. I've done 27 so far and the number this week is up to 41,777. It will be fascinating to me to see how it grows.

June 21, 2005

Up until the first of this month I worked at Sun Microsystems. We used Sun Rays which are basically terminals that I could put my smart card into and have my computing environment immediately available. At Sun your smart card was your badge and it gave you access to your environment where ever you happened to be working. When you use a Sun Ray your whole computer is in a server room somewhere and the server just displays your environment where ever you are. Essentially your smart card is the key to accessing your computing environment.

Since starting at Intuit I've switched to a traditional Microsoft environment. What I've noticed though is that many people use their laptop the way I used to use a Sun Ray smart card. They plug the laptop into a docking station and then work on a terminal and keyboard that is stationary in their office.

I totally understand that there are very basic differences in the two environments but if you think about it from a user perspective and don't worry too much about where the CPU is located then you can perhaps see the laptop and the Sun Ray smart card converging. in both cases you plug them in and your environment shows up on essentially a dumb terminal where ever you are.